Research Focus Areas for Industrial Engineering

Human Factors
—The Human Factors area specializes in exploring how systems fit the people who must operate them, determining the roles of people with the systems, and selecting those people who can best fit particular roles within these systems. Students who focus on Human Factors will be able to work with a multidisciplinary team of faculty with strengths in understanding cognitive behavior as it relates to automation, air and ground transportation, medical studies, and space exploration.

Production Systems
—The Production Systems area develops new solutions in areas such as engineering design, supply chain management (e.g. supply chain system design, error recovery, large scale systems), manufacturing (e.g. system design, planning and scheduling), and medicine (e.g. disease diagnosis, discovery of medical knowledge). Students who focus on production systems will be able to work on topics related to computational intelligence theories for applications in industry, healthcare, and service organizations.
Biomanufacturing is our most recent research addition.

Reliability Systems
— The objective of the Reliability Systems area is to provide students with advanced data analysis and decision making techniques that will improve quality and reliability of complex systems. Students who focus on system reliability and uncertainty will be able to work on areas related to contemporary reliability systems including integration of quality and reliability, simultaneous life cycle design for manufacturing systems, decision theory in quality and reliability engineering, condition-based maintenance and degradation modeling, discrete event simulation and decision analysis.

Wind Power Management
—The Wind Power Management Program aims at meeting the emerging needs for graduating professionals involved in design, operations, and management of wind farms deployed in massive numbers all over the country. The graduates will be able to fully understand the system and management issues of wind farms and their interactions with alternative and conventional power generation systems.